Dance Place, one of Washington, DC's premier performing arts and dance education centers, fired its artistic director, Tariq O'Meally, late last month. Within hours, DC-area dance professionals organized a petition condemning the move, and on the morning of June 12 the group delivered it to the board.

O'Meally, who joined Dance Place full-time in June 2024, says he learned that his role was eliminated on May 28 via Google Meet. A week after the firing, executive director André Mazelin released an unsigned emailed statement: "Dance Place has restructured its staffing model and is reimagining its approach to presentation programming in response to a dramatically contracting public funding environment and its commitment to operating with both efficiency and deeper community ownership." Mazelin and the board's co-chairs said they would make no further comments.

According to the statement, artistic decision-making will now be supported by Mazelin and managed by an artist advisory council of seven locally based dancemakers and arts administrators. Choreographer and Dance Place faculty member Sarah Beth Oppenheim sits on that council — and disputes the premise. "As part of the curatorial advisory committee," Oppenheim says, "I was not consulted in the restructuring, and I do not condone it."

The petition's cover letter, obtained by Dance Magazine and signed by founding director emerita Carla Perlo, co-director emerita Deborah Riley, former executive artistic director Christopher K. Morgan, and former board chair Jannes Gibson, pulls no punches. "We believe that the new 'restructuring' of Dance Place is not moving the organization forward," the letter reads. "The current leadership has been opaque, unwelcoming, unsupportive of its staff and has outsourced crucial aspects of operations." The signatories have asked for a town hall with the board, featuring testimony from current and former staff, students, and patrons, to be held no later than July 17 — before Mazelin's previously scheduled new season announcement.

"This feels apocalyptic," says Oppenheim, a member of the ad hoc group. "Dance Place could go under."

Founded by Perlo and Steve Bloom in 1978, Dance Place has served as a cultural anchor in the region for nearly 50 years. "There is no other place like it here," says Sali Ann Kriegsman, a former director of Jacob's Pillow and the National Endowment for the Arts Dance Program. "It's a living room for the dance community in the DC area." At its height, the center's 144-seat black-box studio theater supported more than 40 weekends of dance performances annually, alongside classes in a range of styles and popular summer youth programs for neighborhood kids. Artistic residents have included Koma Otake, Raja Feather Kelly, Dianne McIntyre, Ephrat Asherie, and Rosie Herrera.

Riley insists the organization was not always in fragile shape. When she and Perlo retired in 2017, she says, they left behind "a balanced budget, an experienced staff, and a renovated building. That was our legacy to the community." The center subsequently faced pandemic-related challenges under Morgan, its next artistic/executive director.

O'Meally — who has worked extensively as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher in the DC area — took the helm with a clear sense of the institution. "I understood Dance Place to be a community center that specializes in interacting with the community," he says. The center lost a $70,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant last year. "I'm really proud that we kept the programming going," O'Meally says. "I still found ways to maintain the integrity of my commitment to support artists in a time when funding was contracting." During his brief tenure, he redesigned the center's presentation series and other programs, and spearheaded the organization's 45th-anniversary showcase honoring Perlo, Riley, and two other notable female dance leaders in the DC area.

Perlo maintains that the organization's vibrancy always required an artist in charge. "Great arts institutions come from visionary artistic leaders," she says, "who work closely with executive directors to uplift, inspire, inform, protect, and listen to their staff members."

O'Meally addressed his departure in a bittersweet Instagram statement. "Our families, our communities, our art…are always under construction, completion nowhere in sight," it reads. "But it is vital that we persevere…because our fates are inextricably linked."

The board now faces a July 17 deadline for the town hall demanded by four of the institution's former leaders — a test of whether Dance Place's leadership can survive a restructuring that has alienated much of the community it was built to serve.